No Whangdoodles
by Decollage
Summary: His business is more than just a fantasia of colors and scents and magic. It has to be. If his artificial world were really as evanescent and cheerful as he wished, Wonka suspects that he would disappear altogether.


It's difficult to be socially conscious when one is removed from society.

Willy Wonka muses on this as he sits at his desk, chin on the heel of his hand and elbow on the blotter (which is purple, of course), folded angular with his ankle on his knee. There are stock projections laid out in tremendous sheafs before him; contrary to popular belief, one can't run a business without the finances, and while the Oompa Loompas have graduated students of all professions from their village educational system, their concept of economics is rather different. Refreshingly different, he thinks, because if he'd been left out in the chill of free-market and cynical bottom lines, he might have gone a little mad. Well. Madder.

It's not all candy sales that concern him. Wonka brand confections are really only the favorite (in his mind, he scoffs at the qualifier 'only'. If he really damned the world as much as he wished, it would be _'the _only', not 'just only', but one can't produce joy and wish ill on the recipients.) There's quite a lot of grain, most mysteriously turning up in impoverished rural markets around the world. When anyone asks, it comes up as an aid effort from Andorra. Most people don't think to remember that Andorra's major industries are taxless retail and cheap alcohol, which frustrates him intellectually, but suits his purposes. It's unforgivably frivolous to peddle chocolate to a select percentage of the world when more than half of it has to pray and sell their children for a bowl of rice. Upon reflection, he's frivolous, too, but not that way. Not after those few months of despondency, anyway.

Then there are fruits and vegetables, most of them hybridized or bred with the genes of other creatures. Not so flashy as jellyfish-glow potatoes (though Wonka does have a few as pets, just for fun, and because bioluminescence is the best night-light for middle aged insomniacs), not so much as to be noticeable. They add extra nutrients and vitamins. He grows them underground, sometimes hydroponically, with sunlamps fueled by geothermics. Most of the factory is underground- easy enough to run pipes down and down and down to where the heat of the earth vaporizes the overlying aquifer.

Keeping prices down to supply children with very little pocket money (he was the first to do so, at least to the current degree- the competitors had all followed by necessity) has the side effect of increasing obesity and complications among the poor. And tooth decay. Despite the belated reunion with his father, that fact alone sometimes makes him speculate whether or not Dr. Wonka must hate him for that. Anyway, the only logical thing to do was to bring the prices of regular food items down, which involved a large scale underground (literally) farming experiment, and subsequent offshoot corporations to facilitate distribution. Which, at this point, would put William Wonka at the head of a vast global monopoly, but being the caretaker-ruler of a colorful, improbable world, the idea bothers him very little.

He's telling Charlie, sweet, understanding Charlie, all of these things in short, measured slips and hints, sometimes leaving indications and bits of paperwork about for him to find. He's a clever child, Charlie, and having been wretched himself understands the wretched. Wonka dreads the day that his poor dear boy puts the grape and the orange together and... well, no, that's sangria, and Charlie will do that next week because that's a top seller in South America, and it reminds Georgina of something she isn't quite sure of but likes. What he means is to get the jump on. To show the workings. To figure. To figure out that he, Willy Wonka, also knows about being wretched. Because that will make Charlie cry, and at almost-forty (actually more than that but he looks nothing like it so he doesn't admit) he still cannot stand a child crying. It makes him hurt, and he hates hurting.

Today, he decides, standing and donning his jacket, they will visit the Oompa Loompa rainforest in greater detail, particularly the plants and animals there. A rainforest won't flourish without its residents, of course, and the Loompas wouldn't feel at home without thorn tree ant colonies, jaguars, sun bears, butterflies, spiny achnids... There are a few Asian elephants in there, somewhere, because this world is carefully trimmed and controlled, so much so that all the jungle biomes can exist in relative harmony. And complete humidity.

Goodness, he hates the damp. As it stands, African Gray parrots get along incredibly well with Bee-Eaters. Regrettably, nobody got on with the African bees, and obviously there are no whangdoodles here.

In fact, for the first time in a long time, Wonka doubts they ever existed at all.


End file.
